Mark Sears is the founder of Godspeed Computing, the company behind eBible. Visit the company blog here.

How did this idea get started, and what was the development process like?

Godspeed has been doing Bible technology products for over 5 years now and eBible.com is the culmination of all our work in many ways. We first offered a proprietary hardware ebook device called the Godspeed eBible. The idea was to sell these in Christian bookstores around the world and then allow the growing user base to purchase and download additional Bibles, reference titles and Christian ebooks from a website. The costs and work involved with inventory, sales and support made this a hard business for the 10-12 employees we had at the time. From there we ported much of that technology to the Palm OS platform and partnered with Thomas Nelson Publishers to distribute and market the PDA software. This growing line of products is sold in retail boxes and download versions are also available at www.eBiblePDA.com. And all of this leads to the next big idea which was to take the Bible to an even bigger platform and audience of users – the Web.

eBible.com has been in development for about 18 months. The first 4 months was prototyping before finally settling on Ruby on Rails v0.11 as our technology framework. It was a major risk at the time. We had a team of Java developers and even had a bunch of libraries and code already available in Java. Still RoR had too much appeal to pass up so we dove in and committed to the now very popular framework. From the beginning we have used Trac for the software developers and Basecamp for the higher level product planning and communication with our partner Thomas Nelson. For the last 12 months we have committed to involving users and have released a new version every 2 or 3 weeks for people to try out. It has definitely been an evolutionary development process with lots of rewriting the back-end and redesigning the user interface. Our team is very talented and dedicated and it has been great to see everyone grow in their skills along the way.

What are your plans for this service in the long run?

It is all about widespread access to the Bible. Right now we are working hard on an API and tools for everyone wanting to use the Bible on their website. We have went through too much work in development, licensing, etc to not share all of it with the thousands of blogs, church, ministry and other websites out there. So we see widespread use of our technologies without people ever necessarily coming to eBible.com. We also anticipate going back to our mobile roots and making eBible.com work well on cell phones and PDAs.

The other long term vision is to see communities develop online where they discuss and study the Bible together. The community aspect of our site is early but people are really catching the vision.

What are your greatest challenges?

Generate the revenue needed to grow the site and accomplish our mission.
Getting the word out about eBible.com.
Convince people used to a paper bible to try doing more study online.
Convince publishers used to paper publishing to try doing more publishing online.